humanities

Article

Climate Delusion: Hurricane Sandy, Sea Level Rise,and 1840s Catastrophism

Gillen D’Arcy Wood

Department of English, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; gdwood@illinois.edu

Received: 23 May 2019; Accepted: 30 July 2019; Published: 1 August 2019�����������������

Abstract: The existential global threat of inundation of the world’s low-lying port cities necessitatesa radical shift in the dominant climate framework of sustainability and resilience to includecatastrophism. Scientists and social scientists of the industrial crisis decade of the 1840s, arguably theAnthropocene’s historical origin, offer a model for theorizing twenty-first century catastrophe in bothgeophysical and social terms, as in the case study of Hurricane Sandy presented here.

Keywords: climate change; catastrophism; sea level rise; Hurricane Sandy; the 1840s; the Anthropocene;Friederich Engels; Joseph Adhémar

1. Introduction

In the summer of 2015, I vacationed with my family on the New Jersey Shore. Unfortunately, weselected exactly the portion of beach that the Army Corps of Engineers had reached in its post-HurricaneSandy restoration project. In late October 2012, Sandy formed as a hurricane in the Caribbean, beforewheeling north along the Atlantic seaboard as a massive, highly unusual “superstorm” with windgusts of 90 mph. In the aftermath of the devastation, Governor Chris Christie, his eyes on a WhiteHouse bid, vowed to rebuild every inch of Jersey’s battered coast. Almost three years later, the ArmyEngineers had established a ship-sized barge a few hundred yards out to sea from our beachsideapartment. From 6:00 in the morning until sundown, its industrial engines dredged sand from theseafloor via a pipeline onto the shore, where bulldozers shifted it noisily about, like infant giantsbuilding sandcastles. Our beach holiday lay in ruins.

Climate change set the table for Sandy. Historically high sea surface temperatures intensified thewinds and increased rainfall by 35%, while 6 inches of sea level rise over the last century meant thatSandy’s destructive surge rode in at greater loft, enough to flood the subway stations on Manhattan’slow-lying southern tip. By the time Sandy’s fury was spent, an average of 40 feet of beachfront hadbeen swallowed up along the entire 150-mile Jersey Shore. About 350,000 homes were damaged ordestroyed, while losses stood at $75 billion in the United States alone (Trenberth et al. 2015).

Urged to rescue the New Jersey beaches claimed by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Christie committed$5 billion to dredging 30 million cubic yards of Atlantic Ocean seafloor back to shore. His aim wastwofold: to guarantee the native claim of all New Jerseyans to a towel’s length of summer sand;and to protect the billions worth of beachside properties reliant on bulky dunes to repel future Sandys.However, with the beaches “restored”, at best, to their pre-hurricane state, a future Sandy will wreakequivalent havoc. In the hands of the Army Corps—the engineers responsible for the breached levees ofNew Orleans—the Jersey Shore restoration project involved no sustainable prospectus. An engineeringethos has thus far shaped coastal urban protection in the developed world. However, engineering,as we know it, is inadequate to deal with the actual threat posed by sea level rise in this century.

What my frazzled family and I bore witness to that summer weekend was an epic, taxpayer-fundeddisplay of climate delusion. In this essay, I will explore the pathologies of climate delusion, whilearguing the case for the necessity of catastrophism in a renovated and progressive climate discourse.

Humanities 2019, 8, 131; doi:10.3390/h8030131 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities

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Hurricane Sandy is, in one sense, an overdetermined case study and parochial to the United States,but its purpose here is illustrative rather than comprehensive—one model of the disastrous urbancoastal inundation events already underway globally and whose impacts cross hemispheric andnational boundaries. The essay concludes with reflections on the crisis decade of the 1840s—a historicalproscenium for the Anthropocene and its multiplying climate disasters. Two notable catastrophistthinkers of that decade, Friedrich Engels and Joseph Adhémar, offer exemplary repudiations of statusquo delusion with regard to social and physical systems, respectively.

2. Hurricane Sandy and the Critique of the Anthropocene

Climate delusion is all the more dangerous for not being climate denialism. Denialism—allowingfor the grotesque exception of the Republican Party in the United States—is no longer acceptablediscourse in polite circles in the West and Asia. Climate denial is a viral, deadening nihilism, but climatedelusion possesses a deadlier irony: it is perfectly consistent with acceptance of climate change science,with sincere dismay about climate change, even with climate activism. However, climate delusionrefuses to accept catastrophic reality, and without a catastrophist paradigm, all climate politicsare deluded.

Catastrophism has long been taboo in climate policy and education circles, particularly in theUnited States. The enormous attention paid to the 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, by climatejournalist David Wallace-Wells, was not due to any originality of its content but, rather, the noveltyof a mass market non-fiction book entertaining worst-case scenarios from the established climatescience literature. The coming years will tell whether the Wallace-Wells’ catastrophist rhetoric becomesstandard bestselling fare or remains an outlier to mainstream climate discourse.

The Uninhabitable Earth notwithstanding, for most of the twenty-first century the only refuge fromthe mainstream media-loop of climate denial/delusion has been climate science itself, in the stiltedprose and earnest graphs of hundreds of papers spread across the specialist journals in the field. It is adiscursive field mostly unattractive to academic humanists, let alone media narrators low and high(climate science does not lend itself to metaphor or verse—data does not orate). It would be wrong tolabel climatologists themselves as catastrophists, collectively. It is the papers themselves that speak acatastrophic vernacular. For a public dizzied by climate delusion—for whom climate salvation is oneElon Musk daydream away—only climate data captures, fleetingly, the physical systems of the Earthas they lurch out-of-control toward a distant post-carbon equilibrium, fitfully tracked by numbers—bya mathematics that slips our imaginative hold.

A family friend was directly impacted by Sandy. He lost a shore house in Brick, New Jersey, andhis elderly mother barely escaped with her life. For him, Sandy was visceral and traumatic and willnever be forgotten. This is true for hundreds of thousands of people in the Caribbean and in New Jerseyand Long Island. However, the United States (U.S.) national media has largely forgotten HurricaneSandy. The psychological impact of an extreme weather event on those outside ground zero is intensebut shallow and abbreviated. Among the general public in the United States, increased reportingof weather disasters such as Sandy has likewise produced a form of disaster fatigue or amnesia.This amnesia is, by definition, not conscious or willful but systemic, institutionalized, and cultural.A hurricane is camera-ready climate change, but the market appetite for a catastrophic spectacle isinsatiable. “Saturation” coverage does not extend to the clean-up—the camera crews are packed upand long gone.

Moreover, what is true of a U.S.-based event, such as Sandy, is true a fortiori for climate calamitiesbeyond its borders, particularly in Asia, such as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which occurred inthe same twelve-month period and involved more than twenty times the casualties but received only afraction of the media coverage. Locally, a weather disaster retains its affective power, but, beyond thedisaster zone, the event lapses into the permanent twilight of vanished reality—a trauma without aliving memory attached. Similar to the greater phenomenon of climate change to which it belongs,Sandy, not to mention Typhoon Haiyan, is viewed as an irrecuperable outlier event, a catastrophe

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without catastrophism—just the Army Corps of Engineers gaily piping acres of ocean floor onto emptyvacation beaches.

Hurricane Sandy as a disaster narrative—played out on cable television in real time—bankedon the mesmerizing effect of the hurricane’s week-long evolution, climaxing in the landfall momenton the Atlantic seaboard. The images of devastated shore neighborhoods and flooded Manhattansubways constituted the extreme weather “money shot”, as it were. This narrative arc was a developedworld human artifact—produced by the Weather Channel and CNN—whose distortions mirroredthe interests of its U.S.-based viewership. Sandy’s landfall in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba belongedto the suspenseful prequel of the week-long coverage. From a physical point of view, of course,the hurricane followed no cable news formula. Its hurricane strength winds actually dropped duringits northward course, though its size increased. Furthermore, for the disaster-struck communities inthe Caribbean, Sandy had passed by the time Christie ordered a mandatory evacuation of the JerseyShore. In Haiti—the worst hit island—54 people were killed, and tens of thousands of homes wereaffected. Roads and bridges were washed away, and 90,000 hectares of crops were lost. Haiti is thepoorest country in the western hemisphere and had been devastated by a terrible earthquake two yearsearlier. It is difficult to name a human community more vulnerable to a violent climate change event aswas Haiti to Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.

Social historians Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg cite the example of Sandy—and itsdisproportionate impacts on Haiti and the New York/New Jersey area—as an example of the“differentiated vulnerability” of nations in the age of climate change (Malm and Hornborg 2014).Climate change—expressed in weather catastrophes—is a hemispheric political actor with no respectfor nation state boundaries. However, Hurricane Sandy highlighted the close correlation of climatechange and global inequity. In the aftermath of Sandy, New Jersey called in the National Guard andpumped billions of dollars into restoring beaches, while thousands of Haitians were left homelessand endured crippling shortages of food, water, and medicine. Given the same extreme conditions,the misery of global warming will be overwhelmingly inflicted upon poor, under-resourced populationsin the global south.

Malm and Hornborg’s reference to Sandy is part of their larger argument against AnthropoceneStudies, published in the inaugural issue of The Anthropocene Review in 2014. For Malm and Hornborg,Anthropocene discourse represents an unwelcome intrusion of the physical sciences into the criticaldomain of social science and the humanities. Theorists of the Anthropocene, they argue, favorcoarse-grained, deep-time narratives, emphasizing human species’ evolution from hunter–gatherercommunities to sedentary agriculture to recent industrialization, with an exponential increase inenvironmental impacts at each developmental stage. This species-level narrative homogenizeshumanity, with no recognition that industrialization, most particularly, was shaped and monetizedby a core of North Atlantic nations at the expense of the global southern periphery—exploited for itsmaterial resources, cheap labor, and unprotected markets. Through the multi-millennial lens of theAnthropocene, these subaltern populations disappear from view.

Malm and Hornborg’s dispute with Anthropocene Studies belongs to a familiar post-colonialcritique of first-world environmentalism. What we witnessed with Hurricane Sandy was not a newhistorical phenomenon—the global threat of climate change—but, rather, the latest episode in acenturies-old tale of European globalization. With a sleight of hand characteristic of bourgeois grandnarratives, the Anthropocene flattens the nuanced history of “culture and power”, of global inequity,and of differentiated responsibility and suffering into a planetary drama that quietly forgives allcarbon debts.

Significantly, however, support for the Anthropocene paradigm has come from post-colonialwriters themselves. In his famous “Climate of History” article of 2009, Dipesh Chakrabarty arguedthat the geological scale of climate change alters the baseline terms for critique (Chakrabarty 2009).Theorizing that climate change demands a species-level category of human agency and a “deep time”elucidation of world history, Chakrabarty insisted, moving forward, on both fine-grained historical

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differentiation and a planetary, deep-time consciousness, but his critics, including Malm and Hornborg,have caricatured his argument as binary, involving a zero-sum choice between “critique” and “science”.

Chakrabarty’s call for a new climate change critical paradigm has been echoed by, among others,the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh in a recent series of lectures published under the title The GreatDerangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) (Ghosh 2016). Ghosh writes that Chinaenjoyed the benefits of coal for hundreds of years before James Watt’s invention of the steam engine.Nineteenth-century Burma was a petrostate. Industrialization was not a grand plan enacted uponan inert global south. Steam-powered mechanization and shipping were opportune technologies tofurther Britain’s inchoate economic agenda of capital accumulation and enabled only a temporarybrutal supremacy of the West over major power rivals India and China, who have, since the latetwentieth century, caught up rapidly. The argument for “differentiated responsibility” still holds,Ghosh argues, but “the complexity of the carbon economy’s genealogy holds a lesson also for thosein the global south who would draw a wide and clear line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation toglobal warming” (p. 114). Malm and Hornborg’s simple dichotomy of the industrialized north andimpoverished global south risks reiterating a colonialist narrative in which white Europeans, for betteror worse, must always be the active agents, the central players.

Ghosh makes a related point regarding the slipperiness of agency in the age of climate change:global-scale environmental degradation, including climate change, has been a catastrophic outcome ofindustrialization but was never its purpose. It is “the unintended consequence”, Ghosh writes, “of thevery existence of human beings as a species”. Responsibility is differentiated, yes, but is also a shifting,complex product of time, opportunity, infrastructure, and resource endowment. Historical time,in particular, refracts and expands. Liberal historiography emphasizes the technological turning pointsof modernity—be it the Watts steam engine or the nuclear reactor. However, in the revisionist terms ofAnthropocene Studies, for the Industrial Revolution to occur at all required cultural antecedents—intechnology and social organization—stretching back thousands of years. “Every human being whohas ever lived”, says Ghosh, “has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet . . .The events of today’s changing climate . . . represent the totality of human actions over time” (p. 115).

Much of current writing on the “long” Anthropocene is occupied with detailing this contingent,even chaotic “deep time” evolution. A “flattening” discourse? For Chakrabarty and Ghosh, the fieldof Anthropocene Studies presumes the co-dependence of human and natural systems and a criticalrealignment commensurate with the existential, species-level threat posed by environmental systemscollapse. Through the funhouse mirror of the Anthropocene, the human agent is distorted, elongated,by turns outsized and infinitesimally tiny, at times unrecognizable. By contrast, the Malm and Hornborgcritique of the Anthropocene seems, itself, anthropocentric. Indiscriminate geophysical forces—and thechaos they bring—are invisible to a rhetorical regime where human government is the first principleand sole unquestioned truth.

3. Catastrophism and Sea Level Rise

Amitav Ghosh calls climate change our “Great Derangement”—an apt catastrophist epithet forour time. In the nineteenth-century natural sciences, French catastrophism, embodied in Cuvier, stoodopposed to the British gradualist school of Hutton and Lyell, which insisted that the key to the past layin the present—that the materials and processes of the Earth, if not its superficial appearances, wereconstant over geological time. However, catastrophism is once again ascendant in the Anthropocenesciences. Under a climate change regime, the future will not look like the past. In fact, our presentis already a “no-analogue state”, as Earth scientists term it (Steffen et al. 2004). The mind-bendingchallenge for climate change science, for climate change policy and politics, and for climate changecritique is to articulate the ever-shifting baseline of this no-analogue world we inhabit.

For example, from the official response to Sandy—or Malm and Hornborg’s article—one wouldnot know that the northeast coast of the United States is, in fact, a “hotspot” for rapid sea level risein this century. In the words of one recent study, “the long-term viability of hundreds of coastal

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municipalities and land currently inhabitated [sic] by tens of millions of persons hang in the balance”(Strauss et al. 2015). Storm surges, such as Sandy, are not, in fact, the principal threat in comingdecades, when rising seas will bring a host of low-elevation locations within the reach of ordinary tidalflooding. According to a frightening, recently published historical analysis of tide gauges, parts of theurbanized coast of New Jersey can expect 70–100 tidal floods annually as early as 2030 (Dahl 2017):roads washed away, homes and businesses flooded, daily life at a standstill—once a week. Inland fromthe coast, neighborhoods of Philadelphia will face tidal flooding once a month and Washington, D.C.,twice weekly. Long before they sink below actual sea level, these cities will face chronic flooding athigh tide. However, none of them, including New York, is prepared for an inundation greater than aone-in-100-year storm, calculated according to a twentieth-century baseline.

With the exception of Holland’s low-lying ports and London, no major city in the developed NorthAtlantic world has begun planning for sea level rise (SLR) beyond a meter. Meanwhile, with ever-risingwaters and increased ocean temperatures, the chances of a Hurricane Sandy-magnitude event on theAtlantic seaboard of the United States have risen to 50% in the next decade. Major coastal protectioninfrastructure—for example, the Thames Barrier—typically requires 30 years of lead time. With noengineering fix beyond pumping sand, the east coast of the United States lies utterly exposed.

The economic infrastructure of the densely urbanized coast is similarly unprepared, arguablyalready breached. Because flooding is the most common, and expensive, form of natural disaster inthe United States, flood insurance of coastal properties is left to the federal government. HurricaneSandy added $6.25 billion to the liabilities of the National Flood Insurance Program, already deeply indebt following the annus horribilis of 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast.With an estimated $1.1 trillion in assets exposed to a stormier climate and higher seas, the future of theFederal Government as a coastal insurer is limited. When the collapse of the coastal property marketcomes, it is likely to be precipitous and will have drastic flow-on consequences. One study predictsthat more than 13 million Americans will be displaced from the coast by six feet of SLR in this century,precipitating the greatest demographic upheaval in the country since the Great Northward Migrationof African Americans in the early twentieth century (Hauer et al. 2016).

The clear and present danger presented by SLR on the Atlantic seaboard exemplifies the shiftingbaseline for “differentiated vulnerability” in the climate change era. Objects in the mirror are closerthan they appear. Intolerable levels of risk—and tipping points of economic resilience—will be crossedin the lifetime of a single house mortgage in New Jersey or Florida. Climate change’s shifting baselinemeans that the industrialized North Atlantic cannot be considered uniformly secure relative to theglobal south. Differentiated vulnerability exists within the developed world. The United States facesan order of magnitude greater exposure to SLR than Europe. This fact has no geopolitical cause. It isnot a product of hemispheric or intra-hemispheric power relations. It is a geophysical happenstance ofclimate change—an example of the raw contingencies that climate change critique must recognize.A social science of climate change cannot be kept pure of the natural sciences; its shoreline defenseswill inevitably be breached.

The example of U.S. vulnerability to SLR in the near term also shows how pulling at a singlethread of climate change science alters the human impact narrative entirely. Under each scenario,national and global maps must, quite literally, be redrawn. What would 13 million coastal refugeesmean for the inland urban regions of the United States? (Hauer 2017) How would coastal collapsescenarios in the United States and Asia impact the economies of Britain and the European Union?In this sense, all “upper-end” scenarios—in the thick tail of climate change risk—tell the same story:catastrophe. This is not alarmism. It is the coolest possible actuarial assessment—the very oppositeof delusion.

What would 2-m SLR mean for Asia? At 2 m, 1.8 million square kilometers of global coastlinewill be swallowed up, most of it in Asia. About 2 billion of the world’s current 7 billion peoplelive within 60 miles of Asian coasts, in the direct path of rising seas or of retreating populationsdisplaced by forced evacuation (Hanson et al. 2011). The stress on hinterland refuges, let alone area

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government services and international aid agencies, will be intense and overwhelming. Worse still,many cities in the low-elevation coastal zone are sinking. Nothing better exemplifies Chakrabarty’spoint about the convergence of geology and the human than the subsidence of Asia’s coastal cities.Rapid urbanization—involving mass landfill and the drawdown of local aquifers—depresses the landrelative to sea level. For several South East Asian megacities—Bangkok, Jakarta, and Ho Chi MinhCity—the rate of subsidence will actually exceed the rate of SLR, dramatically reducing the time beforethey sink below sea level.

However, the IPCC “upper limit” projection of SLR is, by definition, highly unlikely, yes?Not necessarily. Here lies the chilling intervention made by a suite of SLR papers published in the late2010s. The IPCC’s reports of 2007 and 2013 focused misleadingly on SLR as a global average, when themajority of the world’s highly populated, low-elevation coasts—80%—face rising seas at the upperlimit of 2 m. Why is SLR disproportionately higher at the coasts? Local SLR, as opposed to a globalaverage, follows a complex spatial pattern. Both the dynamic redistribution of ocean mass underclimate change and the gravitational effects of melting ice sheets and glaciers deposited in the oceanfavor higher coastal SLR (Kopp et al. 2014).

Accordingly, the 2 m “worst case” scenario for SLR is a very possible world in 2100 or before.Robert Nicholls, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, calls this scenario for what it is:“catastrophic” (Nicholls et al. 2011). An SLR of 2 m, concludes a study by Svetlana Jevrejeva at theUniversity of Liverpool, “will lead to the displacement of 2.5 million living in low-lying areas in Miami;2.1 million in Guangzhou; 1.8 million in Mumbai; and more than 1 million each is [sic] Osaka, Tokyo,New Orleans, New York, and Ho Chi Minh City” (Jevrejeva et al. 2016). The Jevrejeva paper is purecatastrophism, at every line. What is perhaps most unsettling to climate change orthodoxies—andtheir delusions—is that the list of inundated cities and their refugees makes no distinction betweendeveloped and developing worlds. On her list, Miami sits adjacent to Mumbai, New York City to HoChi Minh City. The tightly coupled ocean–atmospheric system of our globe has no respect for nationalborders or GDP. Poorer cities of the global south will suffer the worst, first. However, the thresholdbeyond adaptation will quickly be crossed at all latitudes, bringing chaos to the developed world.As with most climate change impacts, SLR is not reversible on any meaningful human timescale.No engineering solution or political remedy will be available. In the blunt prediction of another recentpaper, “the adverse impacts of sea level rise . . . [will] be experienced by hundreds of future humangenerations and require abandonment of coastal megacities” (Clark et al. 2016). SLR will redraw theworld map and script humanity’s future on it.

4. Abandonment or “Managed Retreat”?

“Abandonment” is a chilling, catastrophist word. Unsurprisingly, it has generated its ownneutered bureaucratic translation: “managed retreat” (Hauer et al. 2017). “Managed retreat” isthe preferred climate euphemism for mass refugeeism, as it potentially affects more than 1 billionpeople in 136 port cities around the globe (Neumann et al. 2015). “Managed retreat” neverthelessquietly concedes that the battle for mitigation of carbon emissions will be lost and that we haveentered, or blundered into, a high-risk, high-cost era of adaptation to climate change. Resiliencewill not be sufficient. Even well-resourced coastal communities in the developed world will notsurvive. From retreat to abandonment is but a semantic half-step—a subtle darkening of inflection.The mainstream environmental rhetoric of resilience takes us to the borders of the known world butnot beyond. Evacuation, abandonment, and mass refugeeism—a world outside the borders of theknown—this is the catastrophist tale that the data on SLR actually tell.

Climate Central is a prominent non-profit climate research and communication group based inPrinceton, New Jersey. With the aid of CGI, it has produced a set of images of inundated cities basedspecifically on the data that has emerged from the post-IPCC 2013 SLR literature. Climate Central’smotives are obvious: hardly one person in a million will read an SLR paper in the Proceedings of the

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National Academy of Sciences, but Hollywood-quality images of flooded cities that capture the samedata have viral potential.

Figure 1 shows Miami Beach, envisioned by Climate Central, under normal high tide conditions at2 ◦C of warming. Equilibrium SLR scales linearly with temperature, but on shorter, decadal timescales,the relation between temperature and SLR is non-linear, owing mainly to the unpredictability of themelting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (Nicholls et al. 2011). This makes for a significant“tail risk” for SLR. The image is a futurist pastiche, with the present-day built coastline overlaid bya flood line at a specific temperature increase—2 ◦C—which will certainly be exceeded, but withthat 2 ◦C timeline extrapolated beyond the present century (Levermann et al. 2013). In other words,the complexity of climate models, it turns out, translates imperfectly to a single, spectacular image.

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coastline overlaid by a flood line at a specific temperature increase—2 °C—which will certainly be exceeded, but with that 2 °C timeline extrapolated beyond the present century (Levermann et al. 2013). In other words, the complexity of climate models, it turns out, translates imperfectly to a single, spectacular image.

Figure 1. Climate Central’s depiction of Miami at 2 °C of warming.

Climate Central’s image of New York City at 2 °C of warming (Figure 2) shows tourists milling blithely at the junction of Broadway and Wall St. in Lower Manhattan, with only the oncoming shadow of tidal flooding visible at a distance. The “after” image, New York at 4 °C of warming (Figure 3), depicts the same corner as a full-flowing river. The tourists are gone. In fact, the entire population is missing, with suspiciously little evidence of their chaotic departure. The buildings, too, are pristine. How serious are these Climate Central SLR pastiches? Is this the visual language of catastrophism or mere climate porn? Consider the twin images of Mumbai. The dissonance of the 2 °C image (Figure 4) lies once more in the presence of tourists at a landmark already underwater, in a city long since abandoned according to this SLR scenario. This leaves little for the 4 °C image (Figure 5) to do, except to prompt us to wonder what they did with all the bodies. Once more, the multiple interacting factors—time, a built environment, the human population, warming temperatures, and sea level rise—cannot be compressed into a single image or pair of images without significant distortion. Is this acceptable if the image makes its home point?

Regardless of our answer to this question, the Climate Central images suggest an uneasy disconnect between the neo-catastrophist projections of climate science research and the growing climate change bureaucracy, in whose hallways catastrophism sounds like defeatism at best or, at worst, hysteria. A consensus prevails, in the boardrooms of corporate and municipal governance, that our catastrophic climate reality be re-branded for public consumption in the smooth-sounding policy-language of sustainability and resilience. Reading the climate-themed memoranda of university research institutes, government, or the corporate world, one comes away with the impression that climate change is a serious, even epic, global challenge. However, anxiety is overlaid with reassurance. Solutions are here at hand: renewable energies, better infrastructure, walkable cities—a civil rights-styled movement for environmental justice. The desirability of all these cannot

Figure 1. Climate Central’s depiction of Miami at 2 ◦C of warming.

Climate Central’s image of New York City at 2 ◦C of warming (Figure 2) shows tourists millingblithely at the junction of Broadway and Wall St. in Lower Manhattan, with only the oncoming shadowof tidal flooding visible at a distance. The “after” image, New York at 4 ◦C of warming (Figure 3),depicts the same corner as a full-flowing river. The tourists are gone. In fact, the entire population ismissing, with suspiciously little evidence of their chaotic departure. The buildings, too, are pristine.How serious are these Climate Central SLR pastiches? Is this the visual language of catastrophismor mere climate porn? Consider the twin images of Mumbai. The dissonance of the 2 ◦C image(Figure 4) lies once more in the presence of tourists at a landmark already underwater, in a city longsince abandoned according to this SLR scenario. This leaves little for the 4 ◦C image (Figure 5) to do,except to prompt us to wonder what they did with all the bodies. Once more, the multiple interactingfactors—time, a built environment, the human population, warming temperatures, and sea levelrise—cannot be compressed into a single image or pair of images without significant distortion. Is thisacceptable if the image makes its home point?

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be gainsaid. However, management of the climate crisis is impossible without a catastrophist reckoning. To the extent that mainstream climate policy discourse suppresses catastrophist thinking, it enables our continuing climate delusion and runaway emissions.

Figure 2. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 2 °C of warming.

Figure 3. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 4 °C of warming.

Figure 2. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 2 ◦C of warming.

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be gainsaid. However, management of the climate crisis is impossible without a catastrophist reckoning. To the extent that mainstream climate policy discourse suppresses catastrophist thinking, it enables our continuing climate delusion and runaway emissions.

Figure 2. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 2 °C of warming.

Figure 3. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 4 °C of warming. Figure 3. Climate Central’s image of New York City at 4 ◦C of warming.

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Figure 4. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 2 °C of warming.

Figure 5. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 4 °C of warming.

5. Catastrophism and the Early Victorians

So, how best to penetrate climate denial and climate delusion—to convey with full force the near-term reality of, in this case, an unmanaged coastal abandonment that will displace tens of millions of people worldwide? Must we invent a new language of climate reality, or do historical models exist?

Figure 4. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 2 ◦C of warming.

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Figure 4. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 2 °C of warming.

Figure 5. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 4 °C of warming.

5. Catastrophism and the Early Victorians

So, how best to penetrate climate denial and climate delusion—to convey with full force the near-term reality of, in this case, an unmanaged coastal abandonment that will displace tens of millions of people worldwide? Must we invent a new language of climate reality, or do historical models exist?

Figure 5. Climate Central’s image of Mumbai at 4 ◦C of warming.

Regardless of our answer to this question, the Climate Central images suggest an uneasy disconnectbetween the neo-catastrophist projections of climate science research and the growing climate changebureaucracy, in whose hallways catastrophism sounds like defeatism at best or, at worst, hysteria.

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A consensus prevails, in the boardrooms of corporate and municipal governance, that our catastrophicclimate reality be re-branded for public consumption in the smooth-sounding policy-language ofsustainability and resilience. Reading the climate-themed memoranda of university research institutes,government, or the corporate world, one comes away with the impression that climate change is aserious, even epic, global challenge. However, anxiety is overlaid with reassurance. Solutions are hereat hand: renewable energies, better infrastructure, walkable cities—a civil rights-styled movementfor environmental justice. The desirability of all these cannot be gainsaid. However, managementof the climate crisis is impossible without a catastrophist reckoning. To the extent that mainstreamclimate policy discourse suppresses catastrophist thinking, it enables our continuing climate delusionand runaway emissions.

5. Catastrophism and the Early Victorians

So, how best to penetrate climate denial and climate delusion—to convey with full force thenear-term reality of, in this case, an unmanaged coastal abandonment that will displace tens of millionsof people worldwide? Must we invent a new language of climate reality, or do historical modelsexist? Catastrophism, as I mentioned, began as a “deep time” theory in the natural sciences. However,with the emergence of industrial capitalism, the language of catastrophism was quickly adapted todescribe the novel social derangements of fossil fuel modernity. The 1840s—a catastrophic decade ifever there was one—coincided with the first measurable impact of anthropogenic carbon emissions onglobal temperatures, and the beginning of the global warming story. So, doubly propitious.

The field of Anthropocene Studies has been faulted for its preoccupation with historical origins.Did human impact on global ecosystems cross a critical threshold with megafauna extinction duringthe last Ice Age? With Neolithic niche construction? Or was it substantially later, with the scale-up offarming two millennia ago or the global biological perturbation of the Columbia Exchange? All arecritical to the “Long Anthropocene”, if I may term it that. However, the Anthropocene proper isquantitative not qualitative—a description of scale. Only the Victorian factory system—scalable anditerable worldwide—meets the Anthropocenic standard.

In a climate-deluded world, global warming science is not taught in schools, but even a half-awakeeighth grader can recite the basic narrative of the Industrial Revolution. Its birthplace—and the originalsource of industrial carbon emissions—was, of course, the north of England. Friedrich Engels, whospent twenty months in Manchester between 1842 and 1944 and wrote his classic Condition of the WorkingClass in England based on his experiences (Engels 2009), looked back on the six-decade development ofthe English factory system as “a history which has no counterpart in the annals of humanity” (p. 28).Industrial Manchester—its smoke-spewing factories cheek-by-jowl with hellish slums—representedan unprecedented social organization—a new order of human existence. He marveled at the hecticrapidity of urbanization driven by industrial development, whereby “a country which, a hundredyears ago was chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and villages, and is themost densely populated strip of country in England . . . The modern art of manufacture has reached itsperfection in Manchester” (p. 54).

Engels’ classic Anthropocene shame narrative sets the terms for the environmental justicescholarship of our own time: “The industrial greatness of England”, he wrote, “can be maintained onlythrough the barbarous treatment of the [factory workers], the destruction of their health, the social,physical, and mental decay of whole generations” (p. 185). With sustained outrage, the book notatesthe ubiquitous expression of industrialization’s horrors and injustice, from infant mortality statistics tothe visibly broken bodies of the factory workers (many of them children) to the demographic apartheidseparating bourgeois suburbs from the disgusting and deadly working class slums: “The east andnorth-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten oreleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither,and that the working-people alone may breathe” (p. 72). As Mike Davis vividly documents in Planetof Slums (2006), the urban slum geography of Victorian Manchester is now the urban geography of

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the world, with the informal neighborhoods of the ultra-poor increasingly concentrated in coastalmegacities, in uneasy proximity to the financial centers and residential enclaves of the elite.

For Engels, who possessed no framework or motive for speculating upon the relation betweencarbon emissions and global climate change, industrial air pollution belonged to a suite of intolerable“conditions” against which the laboring class was destined to revolt. “The carbonic acid gas”, he writes“passes over the roofs of the city. The lungs of the inhabitants fail to receive the due supply of oxygen,and the consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality” (p. 107). Indeed, 57% of childrenborn in Manchester in the 1840s died before the age of five. The coal smog that smothered VictorianManchester killed my great-great-grandfather, living in Salford. My great-grandfather, a boy working12-h days in a factory, remembered the unnatural sound of his labored breathing when he left thehouse on the morning his father succumbed to consumption. Engels wrote of crowds of just such “pale,lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts . . . incapable of the slightest energetic expression”—thedisposable human refuse of industrial growth.

Engels’ twenty months in Manchester convinced him that the social ecology of the modernindustrial city was, as we would say, unsustainable. It simply could not last: This “is not a state in whicha man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and live as human beings . . . Is this a state of things whichcan last? It cannot and will not last” (pp. 220, 219). In Engels’ writing, catastrophism is a language ofphysical and historical limits—the unsustainable expressed through the tortured minds and wastedbodies of the factory workforce. Catastrophe described the conditions of the new industrial workingclass but was also endemic to the economic system that literally suffocated them. Every five or six years,the market demand for textiles softened, and manufacturing collapsed, pushing unemployed factoryworkers toward starvation. These intermittent catastrophes prefigured, for Engels, the inevitable doomof the factory system itself. Peering into the future from the vantage of an unsustainable present,Engels labeled the coming terminal catastrophe “Revolution”: “The only possible solution is a violentrevolution, which cannot fail to take place” (p. 266).

Engels’ critics miss the point in dwelling literally on his failed predictions. Actual revolution wasEngels’ hope, but “Revolution” served, more penetratingly, as his indispensable figure for the unknownfuture that lay beyond an unsustainable present. His insight was thus the very opposite of the climatedelusion under which we labor today. Needless to say, Engels would have recognized “sustainability”and “resilience” as a rhetoric of apology for business-as-usual capitalism. He understood the necessityof catastrophism and insisted uncompromisingly on its language. During the labor unrest of 1842–1843in Manchester, Engels witnessed “actions which can be explained only by hatred wrought to the pitchof despair, by a wild passion overwhelming all restraints”. Carlyle, whom Engels admired, reachedthe same conclusion, in oddly ecological terms. Engels quotes from Carlyle’s Chartism (1840) that thelives of workers must improve “if Europe, or at least England, is long to remain inhabitable” (p. 298).

Catastrophism was, in many ways, the natural language of the 1840s. It came easily to writers ofall kinds, including scientists. An obscure Parisian mathematician named Joseph Adhémar countedhimself among the legions of Cuvierian catastrophists of that generation. When Louis Agassizpublished his controversial Études des Glaciers in 1840—in which he argued, based on geologicalevidence from the Alps, that modern Europe had once sat beneath a mile-high sheet of ice—Adhémar’sreading of Cuvier set him on a path to discovering the cause of the remarkable glaciation. He did sowithout the aid of any meaningful temperature data and only the sketchiest geography of the northand south poles.

A true 1840s catastrophist, Adhémar sought the answer beyond the known world, literally in thestars. Irregularities in the Earth’s orbit of the Sun altered hemispheric temperatures on timescales oftens of thousands of years, triggering glaciation and, with it, drastic changes in sea level. Adhémaroutlined his astral theory of the Ice Ages in a book whose title, Révolution de la Mer (Adhémar 1842–1844),conveys his practical preoccupation with the link between glaciation and sea level. Periodic globalflooding—the obverse of glaciation—was an astro-geological certainty:

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Let’s imagine a continent inundated by a significant mass of water: each part will besubmerged in turn . . . high plateau [sic] and plains, following the general slope of the terrain,will vanish under the water; mountain ranges will peek above the level of the liquid mass,forming capes and promontories, while the intervening valleys will become broad gulfscreated by the flood (p. 107).

In his first year in Manchester, Engels witnessed the General Strike of 1842, the first labor revoltof its scope. His documentary analysis of the rise of class consciousness in early Victorian Britain isrightly famous, but Agassiz, Adhémar, and the new “glacial” consciousness of the 1840s loom just aslarge in the history of the Anthropocene. With the publication of Études des Glaciers and Révolutionsde la Mer, Agassiz and Adhémar together initiated our Holocene awakening: the realization that thecurrent Earth sits, in geological time, between epic glaciations and that we, perforce, are interglacialbeings, our civilization tethered to a transitory, “just right” climate.

Engels and Adhémar in the 1840s shared a catastrophist worldview, and each identified forces ofworld historical transformative power: the factory system and the glacial cycle, respectively. Adhémardescribed the interplanetary forces that determined long-term temperature and sea level changeson the Earth, whereas Engels documented the rise of the global manufacturing system that was,at that very historical moment, readying to usurp the glacial cycle’s control of Earth’s climate. Fastforward to the twenty-first century, the human–economic timescale of industrial growth, measurablein years and decades, has now hijacked the multi-millennial glacial cycle, deferring the onset ofthe next Ice Age indefinitely. Our future, instead, is shrinking ice, freshwater shortage, and coastalinundation—geological system changes terrifyingly compressed to the human timescale.

It is difficult to trace the precise mechanics of industrialization’s global growth, just as it is thephysical mechanics of glaciation. However, these global forces—by virtue of acting upon the sameglobe—have inevitably been brought into relation with each other. This relation is called climatechange. Industrialization and climate change have the same inexorable, trans-hemispheric immensity.The globalized factory system will, in time, be an agent of climate change comparable to the glacialcycle itself. Our global human footprint, measured by ecosystem change, is equivalent to an Ice Age.

For much of the time since their publication, Adhémar’s and Engels’ texts have appeared as verydifferent sorts of achievement. However, in the Anthropocene, world historical time and geo-historicaltime collide, so Engels and Adhémar speak to us in a common language. Composed concurrentlybetween 1842 and 1844, their texts represent a threshold moment for the Anthropocene. Once Engelshad formulated an analytic language for the industrial system and Adhémar his theory of Holoceneinterglaciality, the precursive terms for Anthropocene Studies had been met. Class consciousnesswas the social expression of the factory system, just as climate change is its geo-physical expression.Both are idioms of extremity, whose root language is modernity. With one significant difference,perhaps: Engels’ text is full of suffering people—victims of the human catastrophe of the factorysystem. Adhémar’s book on revolutionary sea level rise, by contrast, similar to the eerie ClimateCentral images of flooded cities, literally erases humanity from consideration. The contrast wouldseem to bear out the warning issued by Malm and Hornborg: critique and science are irreconcilable.SLR is, for Adhémar, first and foremost, a mathematical inevitability.

Similar to Engels, Adhémar has attracted criticism for literal errors in his catastrophic calculations.Reading accounts of the early Victorian Antarctic explorers, Ross and D’Urville, he estimated the SouthPolar ice cap at twenty miles high (Figure 6) It is easy to see how Adhémar’s vision of Antarcticaas, at best, a weird ice cream dollop, prompted amused disbelief amongst the professional scientificcircles to which he did not belong. However, similar to Engels, Adhémar was correct in the essentials.Glaciation is indeed the foundation of Quaternary Earth system history, while intermittent de-glaciationhas signaled mass ocean transport and the redrawing of flooded coastlines across the terrestrial planet.As such, Adhémar’s unapologetic catastrophism sets a fearless example for us today as we struggle tofree ourselves from the sticky webs of climate delusion. The social catastrophism of Friedrich Engels

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relied on a figurative projection of unsustainability—what he called social “Revolution”. Adhémar’scatastrophism, by contrast, was utterly literal. When the glaciers melt, the seas rise, and cities drown.

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Figure 6. Adhémar’s drawing of the polar ice capin Antarctica. Figure 6. Adhémar’s drawing of the polar ice capin Antarctica.

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If Adhémar were alive today, he would no doubt first luxuriate in our great bathtubs ofglobal warming data; then, he would sketch simple pictures of a world without ice. Sometimes,the coarse-grained image works best. The Earth at this century’s end will not look like Adhémar’sice cream globe, but it will be equivalent in its extravagant difference from the known world.The upcoming “revolution of the sea” will not be televised like Hurricane Sandy or photoshoppedby Climate Central. Instead, what familiar world remains will be something rudely analogousto Adhémar’s childlike drawing, washed up on a beach somewhere, framed by a viscous foam,and accentuated with microplastics.

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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